1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates digital content protection.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, transmission of digital content via various types of communication media, such as the Internet, terrestrial broadcasting, cable, and satellite; and selling or rental of digital content using large capacity storage media, such as compact discs (CDs) and digital versatile discs (DVDs), have become common place. Thus, digital rights management (DRM) that is a means of protecting copyright of digital content has become an important issue. In particular, research is being conducted into the fields of digital  content protection, in which an authorized user over a home domain can receive various content services from devices belonging to the home domain under the DRM.
In particular, since the quality of a copy of digital content is the same as that of the original digital content, indiscriminate copying of digital content must be prevented. Furthermore, as a range of a right of digital content becomes diversified, limiting of the range of use of the digital content to various types of ranges thereof is required. However, a specific mechanism of limiting content use to various types of ranges of use of the content has yet to be proposed.